


thought i was a gun

by carnival_papers



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-16
Updated: 2012-05-16
Packaged: 2017-11-05 13:52:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/407172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carnival_papers/pseuds/carnival_papers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You don’t answer when she asks what you remember, what you saw when you were—where was it? Well, over there. You were over there.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	thought i was a gun

**Author's Note:**

> i'm really quite proud of this one. just a short john-centric gen fic as his character fascinates me. title is from tim fite's song of the same name. enjoy!

You are John Watson and you are lost.

You knew your way around a long time ago, when your father took you by the hand and led you and your sister—she was still called Harriet then—around London, down rainy streets and through carnivals, before you flinched at the honk of horns and too-bright light. Your father called you  _Johnny_ ,  _Johnny_  and held you because he was proud of you, his boy, for your good marks at school and your prowess at cricket. You could run then, and you chased your sister about parks and swing-sets until you both fell down laughing. You went to candy shops alone because you didn’t fear the men on street-corners; you were brilliantly alive and bursting with color and you smiled, frequently.

You don’t answer when she asks what you remember, what you saw when you were—where was it? Well, over there. You were over there.

You say something about sand, lots of it, and you try to laugh. She touches your knee and laughs, too, but you sink back. You always sink back.

What you remember comes in flashes lit by IEDs and flame. There is noise in your ears and mind and chest like static, louder and louder and louder still. You are backed into a corner and it is light and dark at once and you are murmuring prayers to a god you are fairly sure cannot hear you. There is metal in your mouth, dirt beneath your fingernails, blood in your teeth. You are scared—no, you are  _terrified_ , you are whispering words no one will hear and you are shaking. Noise, noise,  _noise_ —

Then nothing.

You wake up breathless, fearful of something that isn’t there. But it was, it  _was_ , and it is. It’s there in the corners of the bedsit, when a flicker of motion catches your eye. It’s there on telly, in news reports, when the story about a double homicide shifts into a story about some  _body_  shipped home. It’s there in your head, your bloody  _betraying_  head, when you sleep, when you’re awake, when you’re in-between. It’s there, real as it ever was, gripping you, shaking you, telling you it’s not over. It’ll never be over.

But the girls who touch your knee and laugh never want to hear about that.

When you told your father you were joining up, he smiled something about it keeping you in line, getting you back together after that whole mess at university, kissing boys like you were some kind of—some kind of  _poof_. He sang  _Johnny, get your gun_  under his breath and looked at you expectantly. He clapped you on the shoulder, called you a good man, took you out for dinner. He said you were strong, _Johnny_ , you were his boy.

You wrote letters sometimes when you were over there. They read,  _Can’t say where we are, but I didn’t die today._  They read,  _I think things are getting better._ They read,  _I miss tea and books and night-time telly._ They never read what was really on your mind— _I am scared, I am tired and scared._

You rented the bedsit a month or two after you were invalided home, but you didn’t have a home to come back to. You met your father while he was at St Christopher’s, where he was dying, too. He called you _John, son_ , and you flinched when he touched your hand with his own. He did not mention the limp or the cane or how cold your eyes were. He did not say much except  _John, son, my son_ , and you set your jaw hard against tears.

You remember shaking hands of boys who turned to men overnight, who had girlfriends and wives and children back home, who had  _homes_  and  _lives_  outside of the godforsaken sand-trap that was Afghanistan. They reached for you,  _Doctor Watson_ , bloody and broken and full of empty hope that you might save them. You burned, you sewed, you cut, seeing not men, but bodies. If you saw men, you would become one of them. You burned. You sewed. You cut.

There are shadows and ghosts in your mind, in you. You see them in yourself more than anywhere else—you lash out at the grocery checker, you don’t eat for days, you fight the urge to put a gun in your mouth.

Harry calls and she’s crying because she misses you,  _John,_ she says.

You tell her you are dead. You tell her you are dying. You tell her about the nightmares, but only briefly, because they’re back in your head and in the room and they’re real again. Your voice cracks. Your hand shakes.

You are  _powerless_.

Harry listens to you fall apart on the telephone. She hears your imagined-real struggle, calls your name,  _John, John_ , while you watch your friends die over and over and over. She hears you, desperate, whispering for help.

You read Dr. Morrison’s comments upside down. She has written  _anger issues, multiple triggers, exaggerated startle response_. The word  _PTSD_ is written in thick black letters at the bottom of the page. She does not touch you. She does not comfort you. But you tell her  _everything_ —the boys you kissed at university, the boys with guns in the desert, the sand that ran through your veins, the fire and the dirt and the blood and the light, how you nearly died, how you wish you had.

She says,  _John, we’re going to make it through_. You almost believe her.

Twice a week, you cut yourself open for her. You spill what’s left of you out onto the floor. Dr. Morrison promises she’ll make sense of the mess in your head, so you tell her what you have never told anyone.

It’s in Lashkar Gah on a Tuesday when the Cougar triggers an IED, flipping the vehicle, sending everything up in flame. There’s nothing to feel; somehow there is both no sound and  _all_ sounds. You are fumbling for your gun and you can’t hear.  _Breathe, John_. Black. White. Red.  _Noise_. Someone is screaming and reaching for you and you cannot help. You are saying  _hold on hold on hold on,_ and there’s gunfire, heat, blood on your hands, brown and orange and red like carnival colors. The desert spins around you and you are trying to stand but you can’t. You can’t stand.  _You can’t stand_. The blood on your hands is your own,  _you_  are screaming, you are reaching for someone, you are pulling the trigger, you are dying, you are dead. Someone is lifting you and moving you and everything is brown,  _John, John,_ there’s a pain in your arms and your shoulders and your head and your  _fucking_  leg, your fucking leg hurts and your head is pounding and you are asking to live, you are pleading—

 _That’s enough for today, John_ , she says.

You do not dream that night.

She tells you to go outside, see the peace and the calm and the  _life._ This is your life now, you know, and you’re going to have to adjust. She says  _go slow_ ,  _John, you’ve got all the time you need, you’re safe here_.

You breathe and step into the green and grey world, where the cars are just cars and the people are just people and you are just one of them, alone like everyone else. You tell yourself it’s safe here. You keep your back straight, your head up, and you walk, no one in a crowd of no-ones.

No one told you how you’d long for the taste of gunpowder in your mouth and the sting of sand in your eyes. Parts of you ache for adrenaline, a steady hand on a steady gun, the shiver that ran down your spine upon the realization that you were alive. You want to burn again, to burn and sew and cut, but it’s hard to burn in a bedsit.

But Dr. Morrison says it’s for the best, so you take comfort in tea and jumpers and novels about angry young men. You go to the requisite funerals, take the requisite phone calls, make the requisite walks through parks and streets. And for weeks, you are comfortably numb.

Until a wrench is thrown in the gears of your new, humdrum, beige life.

You meet an old friend—acquaintance, really—who promises a flatmate.  _Get you out of that bloody bedsit, John_ , he says. You think Dr. Morrison will be proud of you—human interaction is good, she’s said, and it’s one more thing you can write on that stupid blog she’s got you keeping. So you follow him.

The man in the lab, the one with strange eyes and a strange face and a strange, strange sensibility, asks  _Afghanistan or Iraq?_

You pause. You breathe. You blink.

You are John Watson and maybe, just maybe, you are found.


End file.
